Posted by Manuel Lemos on 09/15/05 07:20

Hello,

on 09/14/2005 08:20 PM Richard Lynch said the following:
> On Tue, September 13, 2005 7:50 pm, Manuel Lemos wrote:
>> I also am a bit surprised for the tremendous lack of interest to
>> upgrade
>> to PHP 5. Ok, I expected that many people would not want to upgrade
>> due
>> to the nightmare of dealing with backwards incompatible changes, but I
>> did not expect that the statistics would be so overwhealming.
>
> I think there are simply no "must have" features in PHP 5.

I tend to agree, but I am not neglecting the fact that PHP 5 is still an
improvement over PHP 4.



>> I guess this should ring a lot of bells for those that expect to
>> develop
>> products targetted to PHP 5, because the numbers seem to show that PHP
>> 5
>> is a flop, despite PHP 5.0.0 was released more than 1 year ago.
>
> I don't think that makes PHP 5 a "flop"

I think that after one year since 5.0.0 release, only 3.5% of the hosts
are is a fact that demonstrates that PHP 5 is a flop in terms of
adoption as it does not seem to be compelling enough.


> We had this same issue (and experience) when PHP3 -> PHP4 came around.

I do not think the vast majority of people waited more than 1 year since
PHP 4.0.0 to migrate. PHP 4 improvements over PHP were much more
compelling because it was very easy to explain that PHP 4 was several
times faster to run than PHP 3.

PHP 5 does not seem to be any faster. In some cases PHP 5 is even slower
than because now it has to check at runtime whether object variables can
be accessed due to the private/public properties.

Most of other arguments pro-PHP 5 are not easy to explain and persuade
current PHP 4 users.



> There is so much FUD in upgrading, that crucial uses simply won't
> upgrade until more time passes with no bugs/issues.

True, but PHP 5 FUD did not come out of nowhere. Many host companies
know that making any sort of PHP upgrade (regardles to whatever version)
can be a nightmare to their clients and their business because several
PHP 4 releases have broken compatibility several times.

I think the worst was when register_globals was disabled by default in
php.ini . Sure, hosts could upgrade and keep register_globals on to not
break their clients applications, but there were reported security holes
fixed in newer versions and at same time the doomsayers where
preaching that keeping register_globals on is a bad security sin, which
a totally ridiculous claim, but hosts did not want to take chances and
upgraded their client sites, causing major backwards incompatibily havoc.

The consequence of that is "once burned, twice shy". Now, you still have
an hard time to convince any hosts to upgrade because they do not want
to loose so much business again.


> My webhost is building new boxes with PHP5 and leaving the old ones
> alone with PHP4 -- So his new clients get PHP5, and old sites aren't
> broken by any of the rare incompatibilities.
>
> Some of my sites are on 5.
>
> Some are on 4.
>
> I can't tell a difference.

> That's a "Good Thing" in that PHP5 *IS* that backwards compatible.

Not totally. That is a documented fact.


> It's a "Bad Thing" in that I'm not gonna bug my host to upgrade or
> move my sites to PHP5, since I can't even notice a difference.

Right, that is what I said above regarding the lack of compelling
reasons to upgrade.


> 'Course I got zero interest in PHP OOP, XML, and any of the new
> features of PHP5 anyway, so I might be the exception.

I do not think you are the exception. Most new OOP feature were meant to
please the Java lovers. Many of us are not Java lovers, or else we would
probably using Java instead of using PHP cloned to look like Java.


> But webhosts will move to 5 when their clients demand it, not the
> other way around.

Right, but I would fix your sentence a bit: "webhosts will move to 5
when *enough* their clients demand it". The point is there are not so
many clients demanding it, or else I am sure that the PHP4-95% vs.
PHP5-3.5% odds would be different by now.

--

Regards,
Manuel Lemos

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